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Dining Out on Radical Change
It all started with a discussion at a dinner table. The members of a local church in a US city decided to serve hot breakfasts to homeless people on a Sunday morning. Hardly a radical change in itself but the effects were to ripple through the church and the community. Not only was the declining and homogeneous church membership transformed into a growing and more diverse community but also the hot breakfast idea morphed into the establishment of a Day Center. This facility now serves several thousand homeless people, providing 20,000 meals a year as well as a range of services from legal assistance to laundry facilities.
Normally, you would expect to read a list of key factors that brought about the change - for example, a specific strategy, an influential style of leadership or a key triggering event. However, a team of researchers* from the University of Texas found that this radical change looked very different. It wasn’t planned or intended - it simply emerged. There were no major projects or deliberate plans. The effects of small radical initiatives just seemed to snowball in often unpredictable ways.
Butterfly Change
The researchers believe that this phenomenon is not unique and occurs in many different settings. The idea that small changes can have monumental, unpredictable consequences is often explained through the example of a butterfly and how the flapping of its wings in one part of the world could create a storm elsewhere. But why do some small changes have such far-reaching effects and others seem to fizzle? For Donde Plowman and her colleagues the answers lie in understanding the complex interaction of factors creating organizational instability. It’s this instability that provides the fertile ground for initially small change to become amplified into something much greater.
Four factors are identified as being important in creating organizational tension:
- imminence of decline - a view that the organization’s survival is threatened;
- changed leadership - new approaches that disrupt existing patterns and ways of doing things;
- struggles with identity - conflicting views about what the organization stands for;
- ongoing conflict - contradictory objectives held by organizational members.
This provides the context for certain actions to have more amplifying potential. The acquiring of new resources and the rearranging of existing ones spark new possibilities - for example, a member of the church who was a doctor started an ad hoc health service for the homeless which morphed into a fully staffed health clinic. The use of language and symbols is also transformational. For example, the re-naming of a chapel nameplate memorializing a former church leader who had been a KKK leader led to changes in membership, funding and growth. The context was transformed by each change amplifying the others - not in a step-by-step way but in a complex series of interactions where positive feedback had a re-enforcing effect. However, equally important is negative feedback (see post on Resistance to Change). Encouraging people to challenge and counter any change is essential in keeping a level of organizational tension necessary for continuous transformation.
Sensing Patterns
So what does this mean for change agents? According to the researchers, a key is in interpreting the small changes as they begin to accumulate and labeling them - providing meaning to the changes rather than creating and directing change - a bit like a surfer riding a wave. The use of language and symbols provides coherence - or sense-making - to the unfolding pattern of change, reducing uncertainty and ambiguity for organizational members and making it easier for them to generate ideas about what to do next. The researchers argue that
“The emergence and amplification of small change is not orderly. Managers should learn to expect surprise and see it as an opportunity rather than as an indication of poor control.”
The implication is that change can be continuous, unintended, emergent and radical. Much depends on the the ability of change agents to recognize the patterns and to engage in amplifying actions. It offers hope to all those who share their dreams at dinner!
*Radical Change Accidentally: The Emergence and Amplification of Small Change in Academy of Management Journal (in press) Donde Plowman, LaKami Baker, Tammy Beck, Mukta Kulkarni, Stephanie Solansky & Deandra Travis
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Tom Lawrence, our editor, is the Weyerhaeuser Professor of Change Management at SFU.Read Tom's Posts
Graham Dover is a Doctoral student in the Business Faculty at SFU. Read Graham's Posts
Graham - You have done a great job in summarizing our paper. The study was fascinating and the continuous radical change at “Mission Church” in San Antonio Texas continues to this day. There are many interesting questions that grow from our study. For example, if leaders don’t direct change, then what do they do? Your surfing metaphor is interesting. I have never surfed so I would like to know more about that. The leaders in our study clearly played a role in helping the small change become something bigger, but only after it was started by others and had begun to pick up momentum.
I am one of the pastors of the church in San Antonio that was the subject of this study. I have surfed in the past, (many years ago) and i like your image in the summary. I would add that for Karen Vannoy, my co-pastor and spouse, and myself, it was important to catch as many waves as possible since we never knew which one would develop into a monster ride for our church!
Graham and John - What distinguishes a good surfer from a not-so-good surfer? Maybe that metaphor could help us push on the idea of who leaders use emergent change. I am wondering if the following is true of good surfers? They are somehow sensing the wave differently than poort surfers…they are part of the wave rather than standing back observing it….they are paying attention to different factors, seeing with different eyes, than poor surfers….What is it? This might help us get at what it is that leaders do to successfully ride a small wave that becomes a big monster.